There’s this guy who’s so wrapped up in his daily cubicle life that he treats his electric appliances as his children. And then there’s the racist skinhead who is at a loss when a black woman asks him a simple question in the flowers stall where he works. Oh, and then there’s the little girl who feels invisible to her parents and decides to disappear completely.
These sound like run of the mill anecdotes of life in the big city, which, as we know, tells a thousand stories. In his new graphic novella, Iedereen Op Zoek (The Lonely Look), Belgian cartoonist Seb C (a pseudonym for Sébastien Conard) weaves them together to a fully fledged canvas of urban solitude and longing. People rarely talk in C’s stories, and if they do, they use platitudes that seem to aim at covering up emptiness rather than convey real meaning. They dream, but these dreams are without end. Pleasure is furtive, and happiness only ends in failure. People work, but their jobs don’t provide them any fulfillment, and in any case, they are replaced by robots anyway. In general, people are the victims of the rut their lives have become without their noticing.
(cover to Iedereen op Zoek by and (c) Seb C, published by the good folks at Bries)
Just like the way the lives of his protagonists are unraveling, Seb C. shreds his stories, and mixes them up into one long, quite monotonous, lament. He mixes traditional comics sequences with newspaper fragments, games and references to word games. His colours are muted, and his drawings stylised, as if he’s shying away from anything that might make his stories more concrete than they are meant to be. And yet, even though his characters seem to be designed as templates, they each have a personality, and their creator feels their pain, and honours their individual humanity.
On the cover of “Iedereen op zoek” you won’t find many happy faces.
It would seem that life isn’t generous in the deals it makes, and Seb C.’s book is not a book that boosts morale or fills you up with warmth. Still, even though he quite explicitly brings to mind the classical memento mori, C shows enough compassion to grant his readers a little ray of hope. A small masterpiece, worthy of translation to a wider international audience.
(a page from Iedereen op Zoek by and (c) Seb C, published Bries)
Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium and this is part of an ongoing series, Translation, Please, where he draws our attention to some worthy comics work from Europe which deserves translation and publication in the Anglophone world; you can read more of Wim’s thoughts on comics and art on his Ephemerist blog.
Tue, Aug 25, 2009
Comics and cartoons, From our Continental Correspondent, Translation please